MPs vote in favour of badger cull

Labour efforts to split the coalition over plans to protect the UK from bovine tuberculosis failed today as MPs voted in favour of a badger cull.

A Commons motion - tabled by the Labour leadership - had called on the Government to stop the cull of badgers, which started this month.

Labour sources hoped to attract Tory and Lib Dem MPs who have previously supported animal rights issues by forcing a vote calling on the Government to reverse its decision.

But in a House of Commons vote, MPs voted in favour of the cull by 299 votes to 250, Government majority 49. This is a slight reduction in its overall majority.

In a second vote on a Government amendment to the Labour motion - which was signed by the Prime Minister David Cameron and "looked forward to the successful conclusion" of the pilot culls in Gloucestershire and Somerset - MPs voted by 298 to 237 in favour of the alteration, majority 61.

Earlier, the Conservative MP Tracey Crouch said she planned to vote in favour of the Labour motion to show that she was against the "barbaric, indiscriminate and ill-thought through" badger cull.

The MP for Chatham and Aylesford said some Tory colleagues had barely spoken to her since she last voted against the cull, telling MPs that she believed "indiscriminate" culling of badgers would not prevent the disease occurring in the future.

Speaking of her decision to oppose the cull in a previous vote, she said: "I was completely surrounded by colleagues who profoundly disagreed with me, some of whom have barely spoken to me since.

"It was one of my most daunting experiences in my short time here. Today feels like groundhog day, only this time it has come with added pressure to change my mind or abstain on the matter.

"I have been accused, rather patronisingly, of not understanding the science, and worse, condemning farmers in individual constituencies to further instances of disease.

"I've been told I don't understand the horrific impact of bovine TB in cattle or indeed for badgers and that culling badgers is a way to be kind to them rather than it to be cruel, and thus allaying my fears about animal welfare."

Anne Main, MP for St Albans, said she was "torn" on the matter and asked Environment Secretary Owen Paterson to clarify what percentage of TB reduction in the examples he cited could be attributed to the cull.

And Anne McIntosh, Conservative chairwoman of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, put forward a number of recommendations, including allowing farmers to be trained in administering vaccines to badgers.

She added: "We do urge the public to be aware that there is a mismatch between the public expectation of having a vaccine available and what the current state of scientific evidence is and it must be cost-effective and easily deployed.

"All of us are badger lovers," she said. "We are the only country to have given badgers protected status and we have to live with those consequences, mindful of the fact that a badger who suffers TB will be evicted from its sett and die a particularly grizzly death."

Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George (St Ives) said he would be abstaining in this afternoon's vote.

He said the Government's cull would make the situation worse, telling MPs he would prefer to see badgers vaccinated against the disease.

Mr George said: "I have to say that having looked at the best informed science on this issue... it is clear that the balance of that opinion is indicating that the Government is running a very high risk of making the situation worse in those areas where they are going to proceed with this cull."